Soviet-era women stand firm in gas-station uniforms, protesters brandish blank plackards and stylised speech bubbles tell the future of impending doom in pictures . . . Neo Rauch's paintings could well be making a political statement or even longing for a bygone era.

But don't be fooled. The 41-year-old native of Germany's eastern university city, Leipzig, is no slave to nostalgia. Instead, his forms only hint at particular layers of history, and, like elements hanging on a mobile, can be rearranged on a whim to produce yet another unsettlingly familiar tableau.

Rauch is tall and well-dressed, his dark hair stylishly touched by streaks of grey - yet he appears strikingly youthful. Indeed, almost too young to have been formed under another political system.

Born in 1960, growing up in the 1970s and discovered by the art emissaries of the Deutsche Bank as recently as 1990, it seems only fair to ask why it is then that Neo Rauch populates his paintings with figures and landscapes out of the 1940s and 1950s.

A possible answer is that Rauch approaches his work like one would a construction site - but which is also necessarily an archaeological dig.

As a result, his mainly large format paintings teem with motifs from the various strata of decades gone by - sporting the vocabulary of pop art, representationalism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Impressionism and - reflecting the communist rule under which he grew up - socialist realism.

"All these things have affected me and formed me; and now all of that finds its expression in a new synthesis." Rauch remains close to and content with his roots, despite a decade of growing success which has involved frequent touring, and huge demand for works completed and yet to be produced. He has stayed in his hometown, Leipzig, and is more comfortable talking about art in his native tongue than in English.

Rauch studied at the School of Graphic Design and Book Art in Leipzig from 1981 to 1986 under the tutelage of Prof Arno Rink, renowned for his conservative style. From 1986 to 1990, he completed post-graduate studies under the auspices of Prof Berhard Heisig and from 1993 to 1998 was assistant lecturer at the same institution in Leipzig.

He began to exhibit his work only a few years before the fall of East Germany but still his work seems to refer to socialist realist themes of years gone by. Indeed Rauch is proud of being able to call forth such themes in a playful manner with impunity, whether intentionally or not. "I belong to the lucky generation that hardly had anything to be concerned about; there was no repression as such. However, I do know of some people who were only two years older who had problems with their exhibitions - paintings were taken down and so on." By the time Rauch came to prominence - around 1987 - the situation in East Germany had relaxed somewhat, in that the Communist Party and state leadership had begun to realise that painting didn't represent anything that would endanger them, he says.

Rauch came of age in the 1980s during the death-throes of a political system, a period when art could hardly compete with the clamour of student protest and social commentary. It may have been this fact which helped him stick with what he felt from an early age to be his true calling - painting - rather than experimenting with the raft of media coming into vogue at the time - installation art and multi-media to name just a few.

"I felt early on that painting demanded all of my strength. I have nothing else left over for other excursions." He says an inner compass "pointed out to (him) the right direction, even in times of extreme turbulence", maintaining his devotion to painting in the growing atmosphere of liberty in Leipzig.

Although the Deutsche Bank's art buyers began collecting Rauch's works over a decade ago, he has chosen not to show his earlier works on this tour. Whereas these display the features of fine-line drawing and the bounteous energy of neo-expressionism, his current style has moved towards more structured, restrained forms.

As Rauch gained more exposure, his loose association with such artists as Roland Borchers, Axel Krause and Michael Kunert, and his temporary connection to the group dynamics of the Gallerie am Kraftwerk, gave way to this more individualised style, in what he describes as "an ordered retreat from expressive whirl pools of colour, as a squeezing out, a conscious draining dry of (his) former effervescent style of painting."

Despite this paring down of elements, some of the more obvious influences in his work still include colours and forms of the former East Germany in the 1960s, ingrained in him as a child, as well as the industrial landscapes of the lowlands around Leipzig.

"I use the things which are at hand, available and which I encounter in the course of my life. I take them in hand, observe them, weigh them: are they good? Do they contain anything, do they transport anything? If 'yes', they can play a role in the painting." Nowadays, his paintings have moved beyond their early self-consciousness to develop a confidence - or "sovereignty" as he terms it - in which he is free to arrange "contaminated material", or objects that transport a quality from another time to the present.

The result are paintings in which figures seem to perform work with no task in mind, thereby creating a landing strip for the "inspiration" of the piece, and a space in which the audience is free to divine a common memory, he says. If this style appears to hinge on a representational framework, it is one that is skewed by an absolute disregard for perspective.

His reason for employing such a perspective of "meaning" is an underlying fear of realism, he says, but he also refuses to rule out the influence of pure playfulness. "I don't try to direct the action (in my paintings); instead, my paintings carry an allegorical character." But he denies that the subject of his allegory is necessarily political in any way. "There's nothing directly to do with that. However, I can't be 100 per cent sure, in so much as things can creep in, which move me and relate to events in time." Usually, however, they depict "circumstances of my psychic situation", he says.

While the former East Germany has had over a decade of economic aid from the Western states, industry there has never quite recovered from the outflow of labour since 1989, and unemployment has reached almost 20 per cent in some areas. Consequently, the landscape is littered with unused factories - specific, single-purpose machines, become artworks by the very nature of their disuse.

It is in one such building that Rauch now works - a disused spinning mill, chosen for its large empty rooms and reasonable price, he says. At the winding down of the Deutsche Bank tour - whose next and final stop is the city of Krakow, Poland - Rauch still considers himself to be very much a local of Leipzig, untempted to abandon the rich mine of history that surrounds him.

"There is no desire or need to move away from Leipzig. I have a large studio, house, garden, family. I am not a nomad; I need a stable, normal environment, much like Francis Bacon - whom I can understand very well." But if Bacon's paintings could be described as long-exposure photographs of human desire, then those of Neo Rauch would have to be freeze-frame shots of the body's memory; of industriousness shed of its goal and purpose; of sleepwalkers unaware of their destination.

Neo Rauch - Deutsche Bank Collection, is at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin until September 22nd

All quotes from the artist were translated from German by Malcolm Burgess.